


our land abounds

by ideals (orphan_account)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Implied/Referenced Child Neglect, M/M, Road Trips, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-24 06:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7498503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/ideals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He could travel anywhere and it’d still turn up: a hiss from the fuse they’d forgotten was lit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our land abounds

He grew up thinking the wreckage was endless. After years of listening to descriptions on the camp’s one radio—the only news the older reffos seemed to give a piss about—he’d started dreaming of melted plastic mountains and glowing, oil-slick seas. Robot treasure crunching under his every step. He didn’t know a thing about radiation except that it was supposedly all over the place and the recipe for a real shit time, but in the camps kids like him had to hold onto something, and before he’d known about trinitrotoluene he’d held onto trash.

Eventually they had to resettle a lucky few right back in the facility’s blown-apart arms. Before the scavenging biz really took off and people started slitting throats for a bit of copper wire, there’d been his first steps off that UN convoy, his first breath of air laced with the omnium’s silica. His first look at what they called Junker country. Awed, little Jamie had dipped a hand into a mound of it, had come up with a fistful of blood and pretty, light-catching glass.

Junkrat remembers this the night they run him out for good.

Although, technically, it’s the fire they’re running from, seeing as dead men can’t give chase except as a short crawl cut even shorter by another of his grenades. Anyway, it’s _his_ fire—a gorgeous little wonder he’d planned to follow the initial detonation, biting at the horizon with its thousand kero teeth.

He watches his handiwork while slung over his new bodyguard’s shoulder. Each of Roadhog’s steps sounds like an echo, a phantom explosion, distant as thunder to his ringing ears.

They’ll talk about it for years, Junkrat manages to think, whoever’s left: the day the omnium blew again.

He's laughing, waving his arms at the silhouettes of burning shacks and the last bits of junk raining down, lungs fighting the fire for oxygen until Roadhog jostles him—definitely on purpose, the whacker—and the scene stops being so funny. He’s twelve years old again with a mauled hand and a United Nations peacekeeper dragging him away from the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

He’s also crying, but that’s because of the smoke.

 

 

 

He asks, three weeks later, whether Roadhog wants to sack Rome first or Paris—“ _Pah-ree_ ,” he says, tipping a Molotov with pinky outstretched.

They’d lifted two lawn-chairs from the last band of mercs to track them down, but Roadhog doesn’t like his or else doesn’t fit, because he watches their cooking dinner with a silence Junkrat would call even more miffed than usual. He goes on, though, listing all the places he can remember from years of staticky TV: London. Tokyo. Detroit. Places with buildings bigger than what he’d seen in Adelaide the time his crew saved up enough for a vacation. Hell, maybe even bigger than the omnium.

He keeps waking up and blinking in confusion when the facility isn’t to the left of his bedroll. As they get further from the bush the mornings have started to feel like they’re missing something else, too—his friends, maybe, their voices. The conversation is a little one-sided. The water is way too clean.

Still, most days are fresh and lovely and full of opportunities to bomb the living hell out of something. A preemptive measure—less thinking and more dynamite. They used to say it was the radiation that made him that kind of crazy, the kind with fingers twitchy on the detonator. He won’t say he’s not, but this ain’t it. This works, has worked.

So the merry chase he’s planning loops far away from what was home territory, the facility’s carcass and its carcasses. But with that comes complications. It’s why he’s not surprised at the hook wedged between his chest and the strap of his harness, his face suddenly reflected in the lenses of his bodyguard’s mask.

He wants to know when they’ll go back for what Junkrat found and stashed in the rubble. The meal ticket, he calls it.

In return Junkrat tells him, pouting, that yeah, he’d hired him for his skill set, but also because he’d heard Roadhog was _fun._

 

 

 

In Singapore they fleece everything they see. Banks and jewelry stores, but also hair salons and florists and pastry shops. He tells the florist lady about the time he tried to drink nitroglycerine while Roadhog munches on a pork bun, one hand on his hook.

In Hong Kong they’re quieter—not that his MO could ever really be called quiet, but a very small, very generous effort is made. Along with local police and national security a few strange military-looking types have started popping up, and it makes Roadhog something like anxious, or at least more violent. They almost botch a getaway because Roadhog puts him in a chokehold for being too mouthy.

The hauls are still more than what anyone on a world tour could possibly carry or pawn off. One night Junkrat stops running after two blocks and empties his pockets, the diamond bracelets prettier on the asphalt than they’d ever be on his wrists or anyone else’s.

He gets to admire them for a solid half-minute before the passerby start playing tug-of-war. But, hey, he considers himself an agent of mayhem, and with the shop’s sirens still blaring behind them it’s almost as good as the fights over robot scraps back in the day, back home.

They move more out of boredom than anything else, even with the treasure hunters on their tail. They sleep on roofs and behind dumpsters and in any tenement building shifty enough to take a night’s rent in the form of obviously stolen TVs. It’s nice. In Busan they camp out in a shipping yard and almost have a party, getting rotten on rice liquor and milk tea, his new favorite thing.

At around midnight Junkrat blasts open half the yard’s containers—for fireworks. It’s not the new year, but it is the anniversary of their leaving, and for that Roadhog loosens up enough to clink his glass against Junkrat’s. A toast to good beginnings.

 

 

 

He finds out who his bodyguard used to be after they cross the Pacific, when they turn themselves in—just for kicks—to a teeny tiny police department outside Toronto. Afterwards Junkrat props his legs on the dash of the sheriff’s car and roots around the glove box, looking for the printouts he took before the station became a fireball.

He’d treated the line-up like a photo booth, but in the mugshots Roadhog’s stoic. Bored-looking, almost. Humoring him again, which Junkrat’s come to realize he does a lot, even though the partnership is supposed to be fifty-fifty and thus equal on the compromises.

Then he looks at Roadhog squished into the driver’s seat.

This must be the part of him that’s a little crazy, he thinks, because he can’t remember his time in the camp quite straight. People came and went and for some reason he never went with them, even though he took his pills like they said he should, even though the other kids did. It's all one bad blur, like a photo that didn't copy right.

But still—a name on the radio. The adult reffos cheering. Then, one day, crying, cursing real people rather than the robots. And singing sober: _Let us rejoice, for we are young and free,_

 _We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil,_  
_Our home is girt by sea._

Someone must have called him Jamison, too, before they started calling him Junkrat. Or maybe for a while no one called him anything and he’d coined the second moniker himself after the relocation, when everyone tossed away their old selves for some reason. Which was fine by him. A scavver by trade and even he couldn’t think of much of a use for them.

But then Roadhog grabs Junkrat’s picture also, pinching it between two huge fingers like it’s a postage stamp. “Jamie,” he says. And then: “Cute name”—maybe with a hint of condescension behind it, but Junkrat still has to pretend it’s leftover adrenaline that’s got him so warm.

 

 

 

In Los Angeles he schemes up his first proper heist, a real whopper involving two helicopters, some military missiles, and a neighboring gas station. Ultimately, though, they dump that and just go in loud, pins pulled and hook ready. It gets the bounty hunters and various shadowy PMC types back on their trail, as planned. Wouldn’t want them to go digging just when Junkrat’s finally putting out feelers for a potential buyer, even though he’s the only one—now—who knows the omnium well enough to get his treasure out.

And besides, regularly scaring the piss out of suits and government drongos is part of the job description. They’re bringing Outback anarchy to where it’s needed most.

The Hollywood take lasts them until Vegas, where they try to lay low and where Roadhog puts both fists through a newspaper dispenser, crunching the glass in his hands like it hurts, for once. The headline’s about omnic ambassadors or monks or something else completely wacko—Junkrat’s too busy trying to pull the big lug away to read more.

In private he snaps that Roadhog’s gonna have to patch this one up on his own and then does it for him anyway, is rewarded by a bandaged palm briefly cupped to his face before they both cough and look for something to bomb or kill.

After that they spend some time floating around what he guesses is the American equivalent of the Never Never—the Southwest, a big patch of fuck-all save the occasional highway. Roadhog seems to like it. Mumbles something about missing his cycle, which makes Junkrat want to build him a new one. Or steal. Whichever opportunity arises first.

He doesn’t ever bring up the incident with the news, the robots. Junkrat figures what happens in Vegas can stay there, as the seppos say. Still, he thinks, it’s a bad sign. He could travel anywhere and it’d still turn up: a hiss from the fuse they’d forgotten was lit.

 

 

 

It hits him in Arizona.

They’ve seen plenty of them, ironically—dumps and junkyards clinging to the edge of town, promising all sorts of combustibles and practical supplies. But this one’s different. It’s guarded by a gun-toting seppo who looks older than the crisis and who says, proudly, that they can look, but she ain’t selling diddly-squat.

Roadhog wanders over to a pair of Harley-Davidsons—missing the wheels, but otherwise looking aces—that have to be at least as ancient as the early 2000s. Junkrat reads reverence in his partner’s silence. Guess he recognizes an industry professional when he sees one.

Him, he’s silent for another reason. The junkyard’s filled with stuff he would’ve loved as an ankle biter, teacups and big brass-framed mirrors and those hanging doovalackies that twist endlessly without needing wind. And it’s a lot to take in, too much, so much that he steps out of the geezer’s view and flicks open the cap of his detonator, over and over, thinking about where to best set the charges.

This is the easiest part of losing something, he thinks, placing a lump of C4. Choosing how it goes out. That’s why when he was seventeen he wired himself up a proper Junker funeral, one that spits live grenades—so he can cark it surrounded by what he loves.

When Roadhog asks him, quietly, what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, Junkrat can’t really explain.

What he wants to say is that he learned with the arm and later the leg that the things you thought were gone will keep coming back, like a dingo you fed that one time, there and not there but still _hurting_ like when they first went. He misses his mates even though they tried to kill him in the end, and he misses the nights of everyone’s generator running at once and the smell of bushfires and the taste of kangaroo.

What he wants to say is sometimes it feels like he’s still got a place and sometimes it doesn’t and he can’t figure out which is worse. So this is him eliminating one of those possibilities. It wasn’t radiation that made him this kind of split, crazy—he’s been like this as far back as the camp, he thinks.

In the end Junkrat just states the obvious—he’s blowing it all to hell. But maybe Roadhog understands anyway, because he carefully pries his fingers off the detonator, one by one, and holds him until the seppo comes to chase them both out.

 

 

 

They go back for one of the Harleys. Junkrat levels his frag launcher at the old lady, saying that, as a fellow scavver, he’s sure she knows the score. She’s got two bikes, and they’ve got none, and mayhem’s nothing if not a right bitch of an equalizer.

Turns out the engine’s shot, so they tear a new one out of some suit’s sports car and make do. Junkrat even offers to sacrifice a riptire for the cause, though Roadhog’s a wanker about it and asks if he’s _trying_ to make a time bomb with horsepower.

Sounds about right, actually.

They ride a lot these days, into sunsets matching the perfect red of gasoline canisters, dust and spit and debris in their slipstream, his thumb hooked through the belt loop of his partner’s pants. Roadhog must think the wind precludes talking, but that just means he’s gotta shout a little louder, is all. And there’s a lot to talk about. Like how Junkrat wishes he could’ve seen the omnium blow with his own two eyes, the way Mako did, instead of just hearing about it on that stupid bloody radio. And did he really have his walkabout where they put the omnium, and if so how the _fuck_ did he manage, because it was hard enough out there with a gas stove and monthly government rations.

And does he think they’ll be able to go back one day—not just physically, which they’d have to do sooner or later if they wanted any cash out of this whole ordeal, but back to before they left, or before the omnium blew. Or before the robots were ever there.

In reply Roadhog takes one hand off the handlebar and cuffs him around the neck—which, fair, he’d known the answer to that one beforehand, and it still stings for both of them.

Still, Junkrat doesn’t try to shake out of his grasp. As far as these things go, it’s a pretty good place to be.

**Author's Note:**

> i found out way too late that my two favorite junk people took the long way to america, so this isn't actually canon-compliant, i guess. surprise!
> 
> hope you still enjoyed 2.5k of junkrat's sensitive side :)  
> y'all can catch me on tumblr @qeo


End file.
